When network service providers experience customer impacting service disruptions in their network, the customer care agents need to understand what is happening in a way that allows them to explain it to customers, and to give customers an estimated time when service will be restored. Often network engineers in the heat of attempting to restore service disruptions neglect to keep the customer care agents well informed. There is also no automated method to relay the service impacting network event from the network management system to the customer care agents. This can lead to a high rate of customer dissatisfaction and frustration as customers are forced into long queues to be put on hold and then receive less than clear information about the problems they are experiencing.
Therefore, a need exists for a method and apparatus for enabling network announcements about service impairments in packet switched networks, e.g. VoIP networks.